Is nobody going to bring up gun control?

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Lmao. When has this system ever been tested? Unlike Communism and Socialism, an unregulated libertarian society has never been tested. Prove me wrong.

I wasn't referring to an entire Libertarian system across the board. I was referring to the already-seen rampant abuses of certain "inalienable rights," like right to bear arms, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, as big ones, and the measurable havoc, chaos, deaths (in the firearms case -arguably in freedom of speech through incitement by public figures), child abuse (a notable one that freedom of religion is guilty of causing), and outright social deterioration. I can only shudder at the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-style Hellscape an all-out Libertarian system would turn into quickly.

I wasn't referring to an entire Libertarian system across the board. I was referring to the already-seen rampant abuses of certain "inalienable rights," like right to bear arms, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, as big ones, and the measurable havoc, chaos, deaths (in the firearms case -arguably in freedom of speech through incitement by public figures), child abuse (a notable one that freedom of religion is guilty of causing), and outright social deterioration. I can only shudder at the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-style Hellscape an all-out Libertarian system would turn into quickly.

I know slippery slope arguments are pretty useless, but putting restrictions on freedom to bear arms, speech, and religion definitely is a slippery slope to restrictions on more basic human rights.

Also you sound like you're saying the Mad Max hellscape is a bad thing, lol.

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I know slippery slope arguments are pretty useless, but putting restrictions on freedom to bear arms, speech, and religion definitely is a slippery slope to restrictions on more basic human rights.

Also you sound like you're saying the Mad Max hellscape is a bad thing, lol.

Also, people in the U.S. are starting to fight "rights wars.' That is using each other's "freedom of religion" for different religions, or those with freedom of religion using it as a weapon against other rights of those they find "of sinful nature." It has become common in the U.S. that such rights no longer just apply to the individual but are commonly being used aggressively to try to force unwanted conformity in their community or stymy conflicting or "offensive" uses of rights by others in their community.

I wasn't referring to an entire Libertarian system across the board. I was referring to the already-seen rampant abuses of certain "inalienable rights," like right to bear arms, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, as big ones, and the measurable havoc, chaos, deaths (in the firearms case -arguably in freedom of speech through incitement by public figures), child abuse (a notable one that freedom of religion is guilty of causing), and outright social deterioration. I can only shudder at the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-style Hellscape an all-out Libertarian system would turn into quickly.

Those exist for a reason. It seems like you'd prefer a big brother type authoritarian government.

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Those exist for a reason. It seems like you'd prefer a big brother type authoritarian government.

Ah, I see you've resorted to the black-and-white, binary, Neo-Manichaeistic thinking typical of the modern day - that is, that all political, social, cultural, economic, and religious issues each only have two stances, positions, or alternatives, and everyone must choose to take one of the two, and no other viewpoints exist. In this case, it's either inalienable rights with no limits, restrictions, or sense of responsibility whatsoever, or it immediately, as the ONLY other possible choice, jumps to an Orwellian Big Brother dictatorship. Forgive me if I reject the resurgence of Manichaeistic in the modern day-and-age - which was a rejection and condemnation that all three of Jews, Christians, and Moslems agreed on when they purged Europe and the Middle East of Manichaeism, and it's sister ideology, Gnosticism, which is also making a big resurgence today, in the 8th to 13th Centuries.

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From a British point of view, and from someone raised in the countryside where hunting is actually a thing, this whole gun issue in the USA is outrageous.

You have more shootings than anywhere else in the world. Take away guns = people not getting shot on the street, in schools, or anywhere else.

A tired old document that says you're allowed to possess a very dangerous firearm is not compatible with the ways of the modern world. You do not need a gun, and you are not entitled to one.

To be pedantic, I think Mexico now outdoes the U.S. in non-civil-war- or insurgency-based shootings.

But coming from Canada, and knowing full well that the U.S. Bill of Rights was written in a day and age when the U.S. a frontier pioneer nation full of bandits, squatters, highwaymen, hostile Native Americans, and even wild animals that brazenly walked the streets of town, law-enforcement was scant, the borders were undefended, slave rebellions were always a possibility, and American citizens answering the call to military duty had to bring their own firearms, not be issued ones on the government's dime, I think, regardless of the NRA (which is as deceptive, underhanded, unethical, and manipulative of statistics and news events as any other modern lobby group), and the firearms manufacturing corporation, who, like the big tobacco corporations, make immense profits off products that inevitable cause mass death, but soullessly and sociopathically, pursue lobbying for as little limits on the sale and advertising of their products as possible, almost certainly losing no sleep over how many die needlessly to fill their coffers, say, the "right to bear arms" NEEDS (that is a NEED) to be seriously, soberly, realistically, and sanely re-evaluated in it's application to the modern day - at opposed to the late 18th Century.

Take away guns = people not getting shot on the street, in schools, or anywhere else.

18 hours ago, NYrepublican said:

Until the '70's studens in rural america carried guns to school and put them in lockers, until 1969 every NYC Public school had a shooting club. There were few shootings then. Thus, the number of guns and its availability is not related to shooting numbers.

The thing in Florida was the result of a policing failure. Also, shootings don't need rifles to be deadly. Virginia tech was done with handguns.

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The thing in Florida was the result of a policing failure. Also, shootings don't need rifles to be deadly. Virginia tech was done with handguns.

Sure. Blame it all on the current police. Ignore entirely the deep-seated, highly-entrenched, long-standing, multitude issues behind this whole phenomenon and choose a convenient scapegoat, move on, and be done with it (for now). :S

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After that point, American culture and media ramped up the glorification, romanticization, and iconic core nature to American identity of unrestrained gun violence used with impunity. Regardless of how distasteful or overwhelming a task that may be, THAT has to, in some way, shape, or form, be tackled and addressed as a key part of addressing gun violence in the U.S., because like it or not, and legally and officially acknowledge it or not, it's big part of the heart and soul of the problem.

American capitalism since the 1970s has also been characterized by a more marked income disparity and centralization of wealth combined with Democratic and Republican consensus disfavoring the more "social democratic" social structure - in short, the rise of what people call neoliberalism. But my point is that the average person's ability to sustain their livelihoods has come under more and more threats since that time and I do agree that that puts a strain on people as individuals and as a society. I don't think it's completely summed up in the idea of 'mental health', but it's a hell of a big feature of life nowadays. For a short spurt after the end of World War Two and the point at which the global market was healthy again, being (white) working class in the United States really did translate into more and more benefits within the system - those benefits today are diminishing and life is more "hopeless", we'll say, for many people who could have expected better in previous decades. To me, that speaks a lot to why you see white men being the mass shooters so often - it's precisely the population that has lost the most ground relative to everyone else in the same class (whether capitalist or worker).

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From a British point of view, and from someone raised in the countryside where hunting is actually a thing, this whole gun issue in the USA is outrageous.

You have more shootings than anywhere else in the world. Take away guns = people not getting shot on the street, in schools, or anywhere else.

A tired old document that says you're allowed to possess a very dangerous firearm is not compatible with the ways of the modern world. You do not need a gun, and you are not entitled to one.

I am absolutely in agreement that greater gun control is a necessary political goal in the US now (I feel I should get that out of the way first), but I think an even bigger issue is the failure in American popular discourse to address deeper problems that are catalyzed through gun violence, but which exist even without guns. It's interesting that you are coming from a British perspective on this, because it's been the British example that I feel I've learned a lot from.

Specifically, it is my understanding that the same antagonisms that characterize violence of all sorts here in the US are present in some way or another in much of the UK - and in this case I'm talking about fatal stabbings that have been rising steadily for years. No guns = no gun deaths is a simple equation, for sure. But it's not removing the violence, the reason or purpose of violence, and it's not resolving the totality of the underlying social issues (which I know we all have divergent views about). In my view, those issues stem from the way society has organized itself since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalist motivations over the prior medieval and other existing ways of life that have since been more and more wiped away.
(quick edit - also to say, I don't want to make these examples equivalent: obviously gun-wielders are capable of producing more deaths than knife-wielders, and that is quite a big part of the argument all to itself, and that's fair)

I don't really want to start a big argument about socialism versus capitalism, but I do want to emphasize that society has changed in ways that we are still working to understand and I think this is an expression of that.

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I am absolutely in agreement that greater gun control is a necessary political goal in the US now (I feel I should get that out of the way first), but I think an even bigger issue is the failure in American popular discourse to address deeper problems that are catalyzed through gun violence, but which exist even without guns. It's interesting that you are coming from a British perspective on this, because it's been the British example that I feel I've learned a lot from.

Specifically, it is my understanding that the same antagonisms that characterize violence of all sorts here in the US are present in some way or another in much of the UK - and in this case I'm talking about fatal stabbings that have been rising steadily for years. No guns = no gun deaths is a simple equation, for sure. But it's not removing the violence, the reason or purpose of violence, and it's not resolving the totality of the underlying social issues (which I know we all have divergent views about). In my view, those issues stem from the way society has organized itself since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalist motivations over the prior medieval and other existing ways of life that have since been more and more wiped away.

I don't really want to start a big argument about socialism versus capitalism, but I do want to emphasize that society has changed in ways that we are still working to understand and I think this is an expression of that.

Problem with that dichotomy is, in truth, Capitalism is as dead in the water in our current world as hard Communism is. We now have a system called "Corporatism," that has a superficial similarity to Capitalism, but lacks many of Capitalism's best features and doubles down on many of it's worst points.

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I mean, I would have to disagree with you, but I'm sure you knew that already. I would say we are very much within a capitalist system still and your 'corporatism' is not any different from capitalism, just one of the stages. It's an expression of one of the inherent contradictions. That is, that capitalism, by encouraging competition in the marketplace naturally produces monopolies out of whatever most successfully dominated the market, yet monopolies are inherently counter to the need within the market for competition. Even ignoring a bunch of other theoretical crap like the concept of diminishing profits as capital matures, a monopoly, unchallenged, will almost always atrophy the market.

This is why I also disagree with folks on the more libertarian side of things who argue for a kind of 'reset' button by breaking up the big corporations or whatever - the cycle is going to produce the same result by its own nature.

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I mean, I would have to disagree with you, but I'm sure you knew that already. I would say we are very much within a capitalist system still and your 'corporatism' is not any different from capitalism, just one of the stages. It's an expression of one of the inherent contradictions. That is, that capitalism, by encouraging competition in the marketplace naturally produces monopolies out of whatever most successfully dominated the market, yet monopolies are inherently counter to the need within the market for competition. Even ignoring a bunch of other theoretical crap like the concept of diminishing profits as capital matures, a monopoly, unchallenged, will almost always atrophy the market.

This is why I also disagree with folks on the more libertarian side of things who argue for a kind of 'reset' button by breaking up the big corporations or whatever - the cycle is going to produce the same result by its own nature.

This is kind of the point I was trying to avoid, but it's summed up in the Communist Manifesto. I understand you feel that communism is "dead in the water", but I don't feel that way. In essence, I favor making democracy real by eliminating the possibility or even incentive within the economic system for 1) wealth-hoarding, 2) the formation of classes, and 3) ecological destruction. That argument has gone round and round for over 200 years and I don't think it would benefit this forum to go over it again.

It may seem fatalistic, but I don't know what else to offer you. Capitalism is not a game, it's life and death - not just for us, but for this planet (and god forbid we expand to other planets while still operating under this system). To adapt a quote Rosa Luxembourg who herself used a similar line to sum up her own points about 100 years ago, we are faced with a choice of socialism or death.

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This is kind of the point I was trying to avoid, but it's summed up in the Communist Manifesto. I understand you feel that communism is "dead in the water", but I don't feel that way. In essence, I favor making democracy real by eliminating the possibility or even incentive within the economic system for 1) wealth-hoarding, 2) the formation of classes, and 3) ecological destruction. That argument has gone round and round for over 200 years and I don't think it would benefit this forum to go over it again.

It may seem fatalistic, but I don't know what else to offer you. Capitalism is not a game, it's life and death - not just for us, but for this planet (and god forbid we expand to other planets while still operating under this system). To adapt a quote Rosa Luxembourg who herself used a similar line to sum up her own points about 100 years ago, we are faced with a choice of socialism or death.

I only say Communism is "dead in the water" because of it's empirical evidence and presence already in the world. Capitalism and corporatism are absolutely awful. The problem is, Communism as an ideal has many admirable points and very good possible solutions, but has been sabotaged by the exact same factor that would utterly ruin any serious attempt at true Libertarianism - human nature - once the ideology goes from being to paper to being in practice. In fact, political ideologies like Communism and Libertarianism, and a few others, are, by nature much more susceptible to such a flaw and downfall than many others.

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From a British point of view, and from someone raised in the countryside where hunting is actually a thing, this whole gun issue in the USA is outrageous.

You have more shootings than anywhere else in the world. Take away guns = people not getting shot on the street, in schools, or anywhere else.

A tired old document that says you're allowed to possess a very dangerous firearm is not compatible with the ways of the modern world. You do not need a gun, and you are not entitled to one.

"A tired old document' right I am sick and fucking tired of brits calling us one on the second amendment YOUR ANCESTORS ARE THE REASON FOR IT EXISTING it is ment to be a fail safe to prevent 1984 from becoming a reality I like to remind you that in the uk right now the leader of a movement is being arrested for his views you can also be arrested for making jokes about your dogs and nazis so if anything you guys are the one that need a second amendment did i also mention the mps trying to overture a referendum because they don't like the results?

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Lol, boi. Trump literally said he was going to ban bump stocks, raise the age to buy firearms, and increase background checks to buy firearms.

If anything a totalitarian would take away people's guns, but that ain't none of my business.

He not going to do it it like the amnesty watch he is just seeing what would happen the only thing i agree with is increase in background checks that all. And there need to be a firing of the Christopher A. Wray.

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After that point, American culture and media ramped up the glorification, romanticization, and iconic core nature to American identity of unrestrained gun violence used with impunity. Regardless of how distasteful or overwhelming a task that may be, THAT has to, in some way, shape, or form, be tackled and addressed as a key part of addressing gun violence in the U.S., because like it or not, and legally and officially acknowledge it or not, it's big part of the heart and soul of the problem.

i remember another thing that had laws put on around this area too *cough* war on drugs* cough* I am sure a war on guns will end up the same way.

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i remember another thing that had laws put on around this area too *cough* war on drugs* cough* I am sure a war on guns will end up the same way.

I think the guns issue in the U.S. needs to be addressed at a more fundamental cultural and societal level. Simplistic laws are NOT the answer. Two counter examples in other countries to demonstrate this. In Switzerland, it is very easy to own a gun - in fact, every citizen who has served a term under conscription (or service beyond that), which is the majority of able-bodied and sound-minded citizens, MUST own one legally. Gun crimes there are negligible. Conversely, Jamaica has very strict gun laws ON PAPER, but Kingston has often made the top 20 murder capitals of the world list by gun violence in the past 20 years.

I think the guns issue in the U.S. needs to be addressed at a more fundamental cultural and societal level. Simplistic laws are NOT the answer. Two counter examples in other countries to demonstrate this. In Switzerland, it is very easy to own a gun - in fact, every citizen who has served a term under conscription (or service beyond that), which is the majority of able-bodied and sound-minded citizens, MUST own one legally. Gun crimes there are negligible. Conversely, Jamaica has very strict gun laws ON PAPER, but Kingston has often made the top 20 murder capitals of the world list by gun violence in the past 20 years.

I myself think that gun laws need to be based off of local considerations and not by fiat nationally.

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I myself think that gun laws need to be based off of local considerations and not by fiat nationally.

But you still seem to believe that Band-Aid calibre legislation, even varying by community, will be sufficient, and the fundamental cultural root problems can safely continue to be ignored and unacknowledged.

But you still seem to believe that Band-Aid calibre legislation, even varying by community, will be sufficient, and the fundamental cultural root problems can safely continue to be ignored and unacknowledged.

Those attittudes which you seem to find abhorrent have very legitimate reasons for existing.